Speed Racer Movie Review

Let me preface this by saying that I love a lot of crappy movies. I am no means qualified to review any movie, due to the fact that I love films like Xanadu.

My first memory of anime (not that I knew it at the time) was Speed Racer. It was the first show that my parents remember me being insane over. I must have been 2 or 3 years old, and I have a vague memory of being in footie pajamas and watching it on a black and white TV.

It was probably the exposure to this show at that early of an age that imprinted my fondness for Japanese animation.

So naturally, when I heard that the Wachowski's (the creators of the Matrix trilogy) were making a live-action Speed Racer movie, I was thrilled. I love the Matrix movies (yes, ALL of them) and I could only wonder what they were going to do with my childhood hero.

What they did do was bring Speed Racer to life in a way that I never could have imagined. This movie is a fast-paced action-packed kids movie. That is not to say that adults won't like it too, but they have to be the kind of adult that has a bit of kid in them. Those going into this movie expecting high art will be disappointed. Those expecting a visual spectacle like they have dropped acid on the Shinkansen will be delighted.

For those of you not familiar, Speed Racer was the US version of Japan's Mach Go Go Go!, a story about a boy who could drive like a demon on wheels. The US version was campy and good-natured, but the car races and the gadgets and the fantastic visuals what really sold the show. The Wachowski brothers must have been huge fans, because there are so many good tributes in here that any fan of Speed Racer will be going "ooh OOH!" throughout the picture.

For me to talk about the plot here is not necessary. Speed Racer likes to drive fast. It's in his blood. His brother dies during his childhood, and now Speed is coming into his own as a legendary racer. Team Speed gets an offer from a major corporation to sponsor the team, and Speed gets a lesson in corporate evil. Oh yeah, there are also Ninjas, Monkeys, Piranhas, candy, milk, flinging poo, and heart attack-inducing racing.

What really did it for me with Speed Racer is just how fun the whole thing was. All the colors are saturated to the point of being like a world seen through a Jolly Rancher candy. This is not reality. This is a world of fancy cars and futuristic cities. There are loads of great details all over the place, but there were a few things that the Wachowski brothers did that no other comic book/anime has managed to do so far:

Dont f*ck with the Mach 5. Or the costumes.

The Mach 5, like you knew it from the show, is there. Exactly. It's not made "extreme", nor does it have flames on it. It is EXACTLY as it should look in real life. And it gets a LOT of screen time. Sure, there is a Mach 4 and a Mach 6, but those were made for a different purpose. And the same goes for the character designs and costumes. Speed, Trixie, Pops, Spridle, Chim-Chim - all look like they just stepped out of the show. And they all ACT like they came from the show. Hell, Speed jumps out of the car at the end and does this pose that only fans of the show would really get. Even the bad guys have bad 60s anime hairstyles. It's just awesome.

No corporate sponsorship

You watch movies today, and its likely you are bombarded by obvious product placement throughout the movie. This annoys me to no end. In the world of Speed Racer, billboards are everywhere, the cities are lit up like Neo Tokyo. You would think that the producers would have sold this thing to every company that wanted their soda on a billboard. Fortunately, there is none of this. There is No McDonalds. No Pepsi. No Doritos. In fact, I couldn't find a single product placement in the entire movie. Considering one of the main plot points is about how Corporations are the Devil, this shouldn't be a huge surprise, but STILL it is a welcome change from the status quo.

It should go without saying that the visual effects in Speed Racer are amazing. But you don't get a good idea really until you see it on the big screen. Yes, the movie is mostly digital, and has a very cartoony look, but that was the idea. When people get into fights, the screen slows down and motion lines fill the screen, just like in anime. The cars defy the laws of physics in tracks that just could not ever exist. The details are sharp and each race is treated with respect - each has a story with it to advance the plot. While it is eye candy, it is not JUST eye candy.

Readers of CollectionDX will probably love this movie. Kids will love this movie. People who are prone to seizures will not.

Comments

I saw this tonight and was pleasantly surprised. You'd think with all the bad reviews it got, it would be an awful movie, but it wasn't. It was a live action cartoon, and not nearly as cheesy as one would expect. Matthew Fox was terrific as Racer X. It just seems (especially from reading Digg) that people want to HATE this movie without even seeing to for themselves.

The only one I saw was the Motorola walkie-talkie on the janitor/guard but even then I was debating if it was or not. In any case, nothing came within 100 miles of the infamous "memory card tilt" in Transformers.

In any case, I LOVED the movie. For all the bad rap it's been getting, I haven't heard about anyone that saw it and didn't enjoy it.

I'm a huge Speed Racer fan from back in the day (well, when it was airing on MTV when I was a teenager), and I'm also a rather famous hater/snob. ;)

I generally try not to poop on movie-goers themselves, but I can't help but feel that folks who see movies like the Matrix trilogy and somehow manage not to vomit on themselves are either missing key neural activity in the ol' brainpan or have been cruelly drugged into utter numbness by years of Hollywood's war of attrition on the human mind. Suffice it to say, I've been burned far too many times by Hollywood to have ANY hope whatsoever about their pitiful offerings.

But at the same time, I like fun. When I heard that Marvel was actually in control of the production of Iron Man (instead of licensing out their characters to moronic corporate studios), I was intrigued. And look what happened: despite the questionable depiction of West Asians, it was a pretty great movie! I really enjoyed it...and I sure am looking forward to Marvel's public apology later this summer for Ang Lee's raping of the Hulk.

Back to Speed Racer, I haven't seen it yet, but I'm rather shocked by all the real fan responses to it. I was fully expecting it to be universally reviled. Apparently not! If all the negative reviews out there are just bougie critics pooh-poohing a children's movie based on an old children's property, well, screw that noise. I love the kitsch and the camp of the original show and if what I'm hearing from real fans is correct, this has been translated well in the movie.

I agree with everything you said. I too am a bit of a snob. My friends hate it and call me an elitist. I did see this movie and loved it and couldn't help myself when I would lean over to my friends and inform them as to how much like the original show this was. You know, I totally remember when they aired the show on MTV, must of been 1993 or 1994. My Dad would watch it with me and tell me how much he loved it when he was younger.
By the way, Sanjeev, I agree with you all the way about vintage gokin. I have stopped collecting the newer toys and am concentrating on vintage. Your Yamato Groizer review actually made me want to buy the Nakajima toy instead. Even though your review was positive, the pictures of the old one were beautiful.
Take care!

Hehe...I'm flattered by your comments! Yeah, I'm trying to work on the "snobby" part about being opinionated...it just ain't helpful. I'm not going to start liking bad movies, but maybe it'll become easier to take them less seriously and bust on them...as opposed to getting outraged by them! And, of course, I definitely don't like the bit about looking down on other people who like these sorts of movies...that's clearly my own classism and pretentiousness about being "cool".

But yeah, I still think most movies today are genuinely bad--not that there weren't genuinely bad movies back in the day, but there just seems far fewer true gems today than in the past.

Hehe...how funny is it that these comments totally reflect how I feel about toys!? :P

...It seems the more I communicate with today's movie-goer, the more I feel like giving up! Besides Jeromy above, I don't think too many people agree with my views, so don't sweat it! :P

Atom, at least with you, we have intelligent conversations about movies. I'm not looking to make people agree with me, but I do want a good discussion. Hell, we talk about movies and such all the time...and often disagree...but it's always a smart debate. I just think that that level of intelligent criticism is so sorely lacking in most movies today...

I guess the bottom line is that my time is so limited that I need to plan out my leisure time very carefully. Nekrodave was just busting my chops this morning to get on board with reading Image Comics' Walking Dead. Another good friend is trying to get me to start watching The Wire [hell, I've only seen this season's premiere of Battlestar Galactica...and I'm already committed to that show!]. I end up missing half my beloved Celtics' playoff games (even though I've gone to two of 'em this postseason). And this is all the while trying to figure out my art and writing, time to play with my toys, exercise and eating right, friends...women! ;)

The point is, if I'm in the mood to watch something, I'm not about to blow $10 and 2 hours of my time on a terrible modern movie, when I can spend that time watching The Day the Earth Stood Still, or Yokai Dai-Senso, or pretty much any Ray Harryhausen film, or Destroy All Monsters, or the old Outer Limits or Twilight Zone shows, or...

I wasn't even going to give this film a chance until I saw this review.

I'm so glad I got off my "movie snob" box and saw this one. Sorry in advance for the long rant, but I was so close to not checking this movie out, and I want to prevent others from making the same mistake.

Call me a snob, call me whatever you want. I expect more from the art I purchase. I don't like to be talked down to by a film. No matter what genre, kids aren't stupid, and talking down to the audience is the most insulting thing you can do to people seeing your film. It's got to make me think, or make me happy, or do something other than sit and buy another Coca-Cola, or be a ginat advert for some company's products. Be it a diecast toy from 1979, a star wars figure from today, or a movie, I want my money's worth. The time we as humans have on earth is limited, and there's so much beautiful art, music, and films out there you can't possible check them all out. So I'd rather read something by H.G. Wells than Tom Clancy. I'm not going to live forever and I think my time is better spent doing one over the other. That's me, you may be different, and that's cool, we all have different opinions. That's what makes the world such an awesome place. You might disagree, and that's cool, but I'm really hard on what films I spend my $10 on. More often than not, I wait for the film to come out on DVD, so I can enjoy and study and obsess over it.

As a long time fan of TRANSFORMERS, I thought that film was horrible- it seemed like it had no story at all, or at best, it was a compilation of 10 years of bad TF scripts. You might disagree, and that's cool, but I thought like it talked down to me as a fan in many ways. that since I liked Giant Robots, I was too stupid to want an actual plot and not just a bunch of scenes thrown together. Since I liked comics and cartoons, I wanted to see a half-naked chick just "being hot" because hey, isn't everyone who likes TF a guy who has no respect for women? Nothing wrong with beautiful women, but when my wife walks out within the first 30 minutes, and she likes Transformers AND Shia... that should tell you something is very wrong.

As a long time fan of IRON MAN comics, I was so disapointed in that film, I loved the first half-hour or so, but after that, it turned into such a blatant product placement-fest, (everyone in LA drives an Audi, huh?) and the other actors beside Robert Downey were so bad, that I just got bored. I think if the film hadn't been so pretentious as to try to say somthing political without "being" political, I would have enjoyed it much more, like the first 2 Spider-Man films.

I loved Speed Racer when I was a kid, and wouldn't miss an episode, but I'm not a very hardcore fan, I wouldn't buy SR toys or DVDs. And I absolutely HATED the Matrix films, and have no use for fake-message merchants like the Wachowskis (the only good thing they've done with their lives in my opinion is finance the brilliant comic SHAOLIN COWBOY, if you've never read it, get up and get to a comic shop RIGHT NOW.)

This film is just straight-up fun. It's exactly what a Speed Racer film should be. I really enjoyed the entire film. This movie is exactly what IRON MAN and TRANSFORMERS were trying to be, and honestly i'm much more a fan of those two franchises than SPEED RACER.

Unlike some anime pre-1980, like VOLTES V or CAPTAIN HARLOCK, there's no real message or goal in Speed Racer except fun, and that was captured perfectly. It was nice to see a film where it's message was "be cool to your family, try your best, and don't sell out your ideals for cash" which I think in this day and age is very rare to see in a big hollywood film, especially when you compare that theme to the ones they tried to pull off in IRON MAN (I'm not going to even touch the very serious race, politics, or economics that were either glossed over or completely ignored in that film) and TRANSFORMERS ("look at this girl's behind to distract you from a lack of story")

From a confirmed "movie snob", you can safely spend $10 on SPEED RACER. If you felt insulted by other CGI comic-oriented movies, this one knows what it is and doesn't try to be anything more. It's a popcorn and candy flick, not a Herzog movie. But it delivers on the same level, with a visual intensity and most importantly a VIBE, of positivity. It brought me back to feeling eight-years old, without being talked down to like you are eight-years old.